The Sustainability Evaluation for Ground-handling Companies

The increasing importance of sustainability today is developing in the understanding of seeing sustainability as a tool to gain competitive advantage for businesses in different sectors. In airline transportation, which is rapidly growing and where demand is increasing, conducting sustainability reviews at the enterprise level with the specific criteria of the sector will contribute to increasing the sustainability performance, which will be measured at the sector level and ultimately with the sustainability dimensions of the country. In the airline passenger transportation business, which works especially in integration with the tourism sector, ground handling companies are the suppliers of airline companies and play an important role in providing a sustainable service. Sustainability, which will be defined in economic, social and environmental dimensions, will also closely affect the service performance that ground services will provide in stakeholder relations. In the study, the economic, social and environmental sustainability dimensions of three ground handling companies, which were defined as Class A licenses by the General Directorate of Civil Aviation in Türkiye, were examined. In the study where qualitative research method was used, the sustainability measurement criteria of three companies were evaluated with the information obtained from their official websites. Content analysis was carried out by code-category-theme analysis. It has been observed that the social sustainability performance of ground handling companies is higher compared to their environmental and economic sustainability.